How Many Days In a Week Should Christians Meet To Fellowship?

Some Christians in this generation attend church meetings yearly. Many participate in church services monthly or weekly. Others faithfully gather together according to the days their churches have decided to meet.

Actually, most churches especially Pentecostals and Charismatics meet three times in a week –Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

Now, how many days in a week has God commanded His children in Christ Jesus to gather together for teaching, fellowship, prayer and bread-breaking or to worship?

We know that God has not categorically stated the number of days in a week in which Christians must meet together to offer corporate worship.

However, when we study the New Testament, we see the number of days Jesus and the early Church met. They gathered and ministered DAILY in spite of the persecutions poverty and other challenges they faced.

First, the Lord Jesus who commanded His disciples to learn from Him (Matthew 11:29) taught His people daily in the temple and prayed for them.

“And he was TEACHING DAILY in the temple. The chief priests and the scribes and the principal men of the people were seeking to destroy him” (Luke 19: 47, emphasis mine).

“AND EVERY DAY he was teaching in the temple, but at night he went out and lodged on the mount called Olivet” Luke 21: 37, emphasis mine).

You see, ‘Pastor’ Jesus ministered daily or every day. He dressed up and went to the temple where He taught people who had gathered. This means Jesus and the people understood the importance of daily meeting. In other words, they remind us that every day is a day of ministry to God and humanity.

Now, soon after Jesus Christ had ended His public ministry, the early Apostles He trained, prepared, anointed and commissioned started ministering in His stead. They also were committed to being present in the temple to teach believers daily.

“And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved” (Acts 2:46-47).

In these verses, Luke writes that the members of the early church met in the temple day by day, fellowshipped and so they had favour with all the people. For this reason, the church experienced numerical growth daily.

Similarly, the book of Hebrews also encourages Christian  ministers to be involved in ministry especially in teaching, hearing and living by the Word of God every day so that believers may be able to overcome sin.

“But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called “today,” that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin” (Hebrews 3:13).

Clearly, you can see that the number of times the early Church gathered together for corporate worship are different from ours today. They met daily, but most of us today meet once in a year, once in a month, once in a week or three days in a week.

There must be an important reason why Jesus and the early Church met daily to particularly teach and hear the Word of God as well pray. You see, many people naturally retain a small percentage of what they are taught. Besides, people easily forget.

Moreover, after people have heard God’s Word for a few hours, they continue to hear other messages throughout the remaining hours. Some of these messages sometimes oppose the Word of God.

Other believers are preoccupied with the cares of this world which choke the Word of God they hear. This often eventually undermine their faith in God thereby making it difficult for them to bear fruit. (See Mark 4:14-19).

This is why regular teaching and learning of God’s Word by the Holy Spirit is very important. Certainly, true born again Christians who meet daily to fellowship or commune with God through the Word and prayer cannot be the same as those who do not. Hence, the great difference between the early Church and today’s churches.

Most of the early believers grew up spiritually, exercised their spiritual gifts, overcame temptations, lived holy and righteous lives, functioned in the will of God, grew in the grace and knowledge of Christ, advanced the gospel, developed Christ-like character and lived by faith.

However, today, most of us find it difficult to produce the same result. This is a challenge facing today’s churches because we have allowed Satan, worldly principles, ideologies and practices to replace our devotion to daily fellowship with God and our ministry to one another.

Lack of time or poverty cannot be the justification for our failure to meet daily or regularly to pray, hear God’s Word, break bread and fellowship at home or church auditorium. We are simply victims of deception engineered by Satan.

Now, any argument for or against daily or regular church meetings should be based on what believers gain or lose. The present conditions in which most Christians live like unbelievers must remind us about the need for sincere repentance and return to the ancient path on which the early Church walked.

We must pay attention to the development of our spiritual lives the same way we pay attention to the development of physical lives. In this pursuit, an unbeliever is unfit to educate a believer.

By James Quansah

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